Goodbye, Vietnam by Gloria Whelan

Author:Gloria Whelan [Whelan, Gloria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307770189
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2010-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

8

I was awake early the next morning. The first thing I did was to look for the boy to be sure I hadn’t dreamed his rescue. He lay curled up on a mat, his arms crossed over his chest, his legs bent at the knees and pressed against his body as though he were trying to curl up into the smallest shape possible so that nothing could get at him. His face was badly sunburned, but even so, I thought his high cheekbones and the curve of his mouth quite beautiful.

As I sat there staring at him, thinking it was surely a miracle that in all that sea our boat had found him, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. Quickly I looked away, embarrassed to have him catch me staring. But the boy did not seem to mind. He sat up. At first he appeared quite calm and looked around the boat as though he had been there for days and everything was familiar. The next moment a look came over his face of such terrible fear I could not bear to watch. He began to wail and scream, beating his hands and head against the deck.

Everyone was awake by then and scrambling to see what had happened. Captain Muoi ran from the cabin, stepping on a dozen people in his rush to get to the boy. Kim’s mother had taken something out of her bag and I saw her jab a needle into the boy’s arm. It wasn’t long before his screaming stopped and the boy fell back onto the mat, silent and asleep.

Kim and I sat beside him all day, wanting him to awaken and tell us who he was but afraid that when he did awaken we would have to hear more of the terrible screams. We tried to guess what dreadful thing might have happened to him. The grandmother was sure the ma da, the ghosts of the water, had been after the boy and that even now they might have followed him and be all around us waiting to take us into the sea. At this, Anh began to cry and my mother had to beg the grandmother not to frighten her.

It was nearly evening when the boy awoke again. He was drowsy from the injection, but he no longer trembled and he seemed to know where he was. My mother offered him a little rice gruel, which he ate at once.

“Can you tell us your name?” Kim’s mother asked gently.

“Vu Loi,” the boy answered.

“What happened to you, Loi?” Kim’s mother’s voice was soft. “Should we look for other survivors?”

Everyone waited, hardly daring to breathe. Loi shook his head. “No. There are none.” Tears fell from his eyes, but he seemed unaware of them, letting them fall on his chest and arms, making no effort to brush them away. “We were on a boat,” he said in a lifeless voice, “not so large as this. My uncle’s fishing boat. We were ten people, all escaping from the same village.

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